Areopagitica by John Milton

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A SPEECH FOR THE LIBERTY OF UNLICENSED PRINTINGTO THE PARLIAMENT OF ENGLAND

This is true liberty, when free-born men,Having to advise the public, may speak free,Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise;Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace:What can be juster in a state than this?

Euripid. Hicetid.

They, who to states and governors of the Commonwealth directtheir speech, High Court of Parliament, or, wanting such access ina private condition, write that which they foresee may advance thepublic good; I suppose them, as at the beginning of no meanendeavour, not a little altered and moved inwardly in their minds:some with doubt of what will be the success, others with fear ofwhat will be the censure; some with hope, others with confidence ofwhat they have to speak. And me perhaps each of thesedispositions, as the subject was whereon I entered, may have atother times variously affected; and likely might in these foremostexpressions now also disclose which of them swayed most, but thatthe very attempt of this address thus made, and the thought of whomit hath recourse to, hath got the power within me to a passion, farmore welcome than incidental to a preface.

Which though I stay not to confess ere any ask, I shall beblameless, if it be no other than the joy and gratulation which itbrings to all who wish and promote their country's liberty; whereofthis whole discourse proposed will be a certain testimony, if nota trophy. For this is not the liberty which we can hope, that nogrievance ever should arise in the Commonwealth--that let no man inthis world expect; but when complaints are freely heard, deeplyconsidered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civilliberty attained that wise men look for. To which if I nowmanifest by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that we arealready in good part arrived, and yet from such a steepdisadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into ourprinciples as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it willbe attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance ofGod our deliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undauntedwisdom, Lords and Commons of England. Neither is it in God'sesteem the diminution of his glory, when honourable things arespoken of good men and worthy magistrates; which if I now firstshould begin to do, after so fair a progress of your laudabledeeds, and such a long obligement upon the whole realm to yourindefatigable virtues, I might be justly reckoned among thetardiest, and the unwillingest of them that praise ye.

Nevertheless there being three principal things, without whichall praising is but courtship and flattery: First, when that onlyis praised which is solidly worth praise: next, when greatestlikelihoods are brought that such things are truly and really inthose persons to whom they are ascribed: the other, when he whopraises, by showing that such his actual persuasion is of whom hewrites, can demonstrate that he flatters not; the former two ofthese I have heretofore endeavoured, rescuing the employment fromhim who went about to impair your merits with a trivial andmalignant encomium; the latter as belonging chiefly to mine ownacquittal, that whom I so extolled I did not flatter, hath beenreserved opportunely to this occasion.

For he who freely magnifies what hath been nobly done, and fearsnot to declare as freely what might be done better, gives ye thebest covenant of his fidelity; and that his loyalest affection andhis hope waits on your proceedings. His highest praising is notflattery, and his plainest advice is a kind of praising. Forthough I should affirm and hold by argument, that it would farebetter with truth, with learning and the Commonwealth, if one ofyour published Orders, which I should name, were called in; yet atthe same time it could not but much redound to the lustre of yourmild and equal government, whenas private persons are herebyanimated to think ye better pleased with public advice, than otherstatists have been delighted heretofore with public flattery. Andmen will then see what difference there is between the magnanimityof a triennial Parliament, and that jealous haughtiness of prelatesand cabin counsellors that usurped of late, whenas they shallobserve ye in the midst of your victories and successes more gentlybrooking written exceptions against a voted Order than othercourts, which had produced nothing worth memory but the weakostentation of wealth, would have endured the least signifieddislike at any sudden proclamation.

If I should thus far presume upon the meek demeanour of yourcivil and gentle greatness, Lords and Commons, as what yourpublished Order hath directly said, that to gainsay, I might defendmyself with ease, if any should accuse me of being new or insolent,did they but know how much better I find ye esteem it to imitatethe old and elegant humanity of Greece, than the barbaric pride ofa Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness. And out of those ages, towhose polite wisdom and letters we owe that we are not yet Gothsand Jutlanders, I could name him who from his private house wrotethat discourse to the Parliament of Athens, that persuades them tochange the form of democracy which was then established. Suchhonour was done in those days to men who professed the study ofwisdom and eloquence, not only in their own country, but in otherlands, that cities and signiories heard them gladly, and with greatrespect, if they had aught in public to admonish the state. Thusdid Dion Prusaeus, a stranger and a private orator, counsel theRhodians against a former edict; and I abound with other likeexamples, which to set here would be superfluous.

But if from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studiouslabours, and those natural endowments haply not the worst for twoand fifty degrees of northern latitude, so much must be derogated,as to count me not equal to any of those who had this privilege, Iwould obtain to be thought not so inferior, as yourselves aresuperior to the most of them who received their counsel: and howfar you excel them, be assured, Lords and Commons, there can nogreater testimony appear, than when your prudent spiritacknowledges and obeys the voice of reason from what quarter soeverit be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any Actof your own setting forth, as any set forth by your predecessors.

If ye be thus resolved, as it were injury to think ye werenot, I know not what should withhold me from presenting ye with afit instance wherein to show both that love of truth which yeeminently profess, and that uprightness of your judgment which isnot wont to be partial to yourselves; by judging over again thatOrder which ye have ordained to regulate printing:--that no book,pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth printed, unless the same befirst approved and licensed by such, or at least one of such, asshall be thereto appointed. For that part which preserves justlyevery man's copy to himself, or provides for the poor, I touch not,only wish they be not made pretences to abuse and persecute honestand painful men, who offend not in either of these particulars. But that other clause of licensing books, which we thought had diedwith his brother quadragesimal and matrimonial when the prelatesexpired, I shall now attend with such a homily, as shall lay beforeye, first the inventors of it to be those whom ye will be loath toown; next what is to be thought in general of reading, whateversort the books be; and that this Order avails nothing to thesuppressing of scandalous, seditious, and libellous books, whichwere mainly intended to be suppressed. Last, that it will beprimely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop oftruth, not only by disexercising and blunting our abilities in whatwe know already, but by hindering and cropping the discovery thatmight be yet further made both in religious and civil wisdom.

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Churchand Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demeanthemselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, anddo sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are notabsolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them tobe as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they dopreserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of thatliving intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and asvigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and beingsown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, onthe other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a manas kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature,God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself,kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives aburden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood ofa master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a lifebeyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhapsthere is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recoverthe loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nationsfare the worse.

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise againstthe living labours of public men, how we spill that seasoned lifeof man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind ofhomicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if itextend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof theexecution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikesat that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself,slays an immortality rather than a life. But lest I should becondemned of introducing license, while I oppose licensing, Irefuse not the pains to be so much historical, as will serve toshow what hath been done by ancient and famous commonwealthsagainst this disorder, till the very time that this project oflicensing crept out of the Inquisition, was catched up by ourprelates, and hath caught some of our presbyters.

In Athens, where books and wits were ever busier than in anyother part of Greece, I find but only two sorts of writings whichthe magistrate cared to take notice of; those either blasphemousand atheistical, or libellous. Thus the books of Protagoras wereby the judges of Areopagus commanded to be burnt, and himselfbanished the territory for a discourse begun with his confessingnot to know WHETHER THERE WERE GODS, OR WHETHER NOT. Andagainst defaming, it was decreed that none should be traduced byname, as was the manner of Vetus Comoedia, whereby we may guess howthey censured libelling. And this course was quick enough, asCicero writes, to quell both the desperate wits of other atheists,and the open way of defaming, as the event showed. Of other sectsand opinions, though tending to voluptuousness, and the denying ofdivine Providence, they took no heed.

Therefore we do not read that either Epicurus, or that libertineschool of Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was everquestioned by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writingsof those old comedians were suppressed, though the acting of themwere forbid; and that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes,the loosest of them all, to his royal scholar Dionysius, iscommonly known, and may be excused, if holy Chrysostom, as isreported, nightly studied so much the same author and had the artto cleanse a scurrilous vehemence into the style of a rousingsermon.

That other leading city of Greece, Lacedaemon, considering thatLycurgus their lawgiver was so addicted to elegant learning, as tohave been the first that brought out of Ionia the scattered worksof Homer, and sent the poet Thales from Crete to prepare andmollify the Spartan surliness with his smooth songs and odes, thebetter to plant among them law and civility, it is to be wonderedhow museless and unbookish they were, minding nought but the featsof war. There needed no licensing of books among them, for theydisliked all but their own laconic apophthegms, and took a slightoccasion to chase Archilochus out of their city, perhaps forcomposing in a higher strain than their own soldierly ballads androundels could reach to. Or if it were for his broad verses, theywere not therein so cautious but they were as dissolute in theirpromiscuous conversing; whence Euripides affirms in Andromache,that their women were all unchaste. Thus much may give us lightafter what sort of books were prohibited among the Greeks.

The Romans also, for many ages trained up only to a militaryroughness resembling most the Lacedaemonian guise, knew of learninglittle but what their twelve Tables, and the Pontific College withtheir augurs and flamens taught them in religion and law; sounacquainted with other learning, that when Carneades andCritolaus, with the Stoic Diogenes, coming ambassadors to Rome,took thereby occasion to give the city a taste of their philosophy,they were suspected for seducers by no less a man than Cato theCensor, who moved it in the Senate to dismiss them speedily, and tobanish all such Attic babblers out of Italy. But Scipio and othersof the noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabine austerity;honoured and admired the men; and the censor himself at last, inhis old age, fell to the study of that whereof before he was soscrupulous. And yet at the same time Naevius and Plautus, thefirst Latin comedians, had filled the city with all the borrowedscenes of Menander and Philemon. Then began to be considered therealso what was to be done to libellous books and authors; forNaevius was quickly cast into prison for his unbridled pen, andreleased by the tribunes upon his recantation; we read also thatlibels were burnt, and the makers punished by Augustus. The likeseverity, no doubt, was used, if aught were impiously writtenagainst their esteemed gods. Except in these two points, how theworld went in books, the magistrate kept no reckoning.

And therefore Lucretius without impeachment versifies hisEpicurism to Memmius, and had the honour to be set forth the secondtime by Cicero, so great a father of the Commonwealth; althoughhimself disputes against that opinion in his own writings. Nor wasthe satirical sharpness or naked plainness of Lucilius, orCatullus, or Flaccus, by any order prohibited. And for matters ofstate, the story of Titus Livius, though it extolled that partwhich Pompey held, was not therefore suppressed by Octavius Caesarof the other faction. But that Naso was by him banished in his oldage, for the wanton poems of his youth, was but a mere covert ofstate over some secret cause: and besides, the books were neitherbanished nor called in. From hence we shall meet with little elsebut tyranny in the Roman empire, that we may not marvel, if not sooften bad as good books were silenced. I shall therefore deem tohave been large enough, in producing what among the ancients waspunishable to write; save only which, all other arguments were freeto treat on.

By this time the emperors were become Christians, whosediscipline in this point I do not find to have been more severethan what was formerly in practice. The books of those whom theytook to be grand heretics were examined, refuted, and condemned inthe general Councils; and not till then were prohibited, or burnt,by authority of the emperor. As for the writings of heathenauthors, unless they were plain invectives against Christianity, asthose of Porphyrius and Proclus, they met with no interdict thatcan be cited, till about the year 400, in a Carthaginian Council,wherein bishops themselves were forbid to read the books ofGentiles, but heresies they might read: while others long beforethem, on the contrary, scrupled more the books of heretics than ofGentiles. And that the primitive Councils and bishops were wontonly to declare what books were not commendable, passing nofurther, but leaving it to each one's conscience to read or to layby, till after the year 800, is observed already by Padre Paolo,the great unmasker of the Trentine Council.

After which time the Popes of Rome, engrossing what they pleasedof political rule into their own hands, extended their dominionover men's eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burningand prohibiting to be read what they fancied not; yet sparing intheir censures, and the books not many which they so dealt with:till Martin V., by his bull, not only prohibited, but was the firstthat excommunicated the reading of heretical books; for about thattime Wickliffe and Huss, growing terrible, were they who firstdrove the Papal Court to a stricter policy of prohibiting. Whichcourse Leo X. and his successors followed, until the Council ofTrent and the Spanish Inquisition engendering together broughtforth, or perfected, those Catalogues and expurging Indexes, thatrake through the entrails of many an old good author, with aviolation worse than any could be offered to his tomb. Nor didthey stay in matters heretical, but any subject that was not totheir palate, they either condemned in a Prohibition, or had itstraight into the new purgatory of an index.

To fill up the measure of encroachment, their last invention wasto ordain that no book, pamphlet, or paper should be printed (as ifSt. Peter had bequeathed them the keys of the press also out ofParadise) unless it were approved and licensed under the hands oftwo or three glutton friars. For example:

Let the Chancellor Cini be pleased to see if in this present work be contained aught that may withstand the printing.

VINCENT RABBATTA, Vicar of Florence.

I have seen this present work, and find nothing athwart the Catholic faith and good manners: in witness whereof I have given, etc.

NICOLO GINI, Chancellor of Florence.

Attending the precedent relation, it is allowed that this present work of Davanzati may be printed.

Sure they have a conceit, if he of the bottomless pit had notlong since broke prison, that this quadruple exorcism would bar himdown. I fear their next design will be to get into their custodythe licensing of that which they say Claudius intended, but wentnot through with. Vouchsafe to see another of their forms, theRoman stamp:

Imprimatur, If it seem good to the reverend Master of the

Holy Palace.

BELCASTRO, Vicegerent.

Imprimatur, Friar Nicolo Rodolphi, Master of the Holy Palace.

Sometimes five Imprimaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in thepiazza of one title-page, complimenting and ducking each to otherwith their shaven reverences, whether the author, who stands by inperplexity at the foot of his epistle, shall to the press or to thesponge. These are the pretty responsories, these are the dearantiphonies, that so bewitched of late our prelates and theirchaplains with the goodly echo they made; and besotted us to thegay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House,another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly Romanizing, thatthe word of command still was set down in Latin; as if the learnedgrammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; orperhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy toexpress the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope,for that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremostin the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servileletters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption English.

And thus ye have the inventors and the original of book-licensingripped up and drawn as lineally as any pedigree. We have it not,that can be heard of, from any ancient state, or polity or church;nor by any statute left us by our ancestors elder or later; norfrom the modern custom of any reformed city or church abroad, butfrom the most anti-christian council and the most tyrannousinquisition that ever inquired. Till then books were ever asfreely admitted into the world as any other birth; the issue of thebrain was no more stifled than the issue of the womb: no enviousJuno sat cross-legged over the nativity of any man's intellectualoffspring; but if it proved a monster, who denies, but that it wasjustly burnt, or sunk into the sea? But that a book, in worsecondition than a peccant soul, should be to stand before a jury ereit be born to the world, and undergo yet in darkness the judgmentof Radamanth and his colleagues, ere it can pass the ferry backwardinto light, was never heard before, till that mysterious iniquity,provoked and troubled at the first entrance of Reformation, soughtout new limbos and new hells wherein they might include our booksalso within the number of their damned. And this was the raremorsel so officiously snatched up, and so ill-favouredly imitatedby our inquisiturient bishops, and the attendant minorites theirchaplains. That ye like not now these most certain authors of thislicensing order, and that all sinister intention was far distantfrom your thoughts, when ye were importuned the passing it, all menwho know the integrity of your actions, and how ye honour truth,will clear ye readily.

But some will say, what though the inventors were bad, the thingfor all that may be good? It may so; yet if that thing be no suchdeep invention, but obvious, and easy for any man to light on, andyet best and wisest commonwealths through all ages and occasionshave forborne to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of menwere the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but toobstruct and hinder the first approach of Reformation; I am ofthose who believe it will be a harder alchemy than Lullius everknew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet thisonly is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may beheld a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves,for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one theproperties it has. But I have first to finish, as was propounded,what is to be thought in general of reading books, whatever sortthey be, and whether be more the benefit or the harm that thenceproceeds.

Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, whowere skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, andGreeks, which could not probably be without reading their books ofall sorts; in Paul especially, who thought it no defilement toinsert into Holy Scripture the sentences of three Greek poets, andone of them a tragedian; the question was notwithstanding sometimescontroverted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds onthat side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable; as was thenevidently perceived, when Julian the Apostate and subtlest enemy toour faith made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathenlearning: for, said he, they wound us with our own weapons, andwith our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed theChristians were put so to their shifts by this crafty means, and somuch in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the twoApollinarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the sevenliberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers forms oforations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a newChristian grammar. But, saith the historian Socrates, theprovidence of God provided better than the industry of Apollinariusand his son, by taking away that illiterate law with the life ofhim who devised it. So great an injury they then held it to bedeprived of Hellenic learning; and thought it a persecution moreundermining, and secretly decaying the Church, than the opencruelty of Decius or Diocletian.

And perhaps it was the same politic drift that the devilwhipped St. Jerome in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or elseit was a phantasm bred by the fever which had then seized him. Forhad an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling toomuch upon Ciceronianisms, and had chastised the reading, not thevanity, it had been plainly partial; first to correct him for graveCicero, and not for scurril Plautus, whom he confesses to have beenreading, not long before; next to correct him only, and let so manymore ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studieswithout the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basilteaches how some good use may be made of Margites, a sportfulpoem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same purpose?

But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is avision recorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale ofJerome, to the nun Eustochium, and, besides, has nothing of a feverin it. Dionysius Alexandrinus was about the year 240 a person ofgreat name in the Church for piety and learning, who had wont toavail himself much against heretics by being conversant in theirbooks; until a certain presbyter laid it scrupulously to hisconscience, how he durst venture himself among those defilingvolumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence, fell into a newdebate with himself what was to be thought; when suddenly a visionsent from God (it is his own epistle that so avers it) confirmedhim in these words: READ ANY BOOKS WHATEVER COME TO THY HANDS,FOR THOU ART SUFFICIENT BOTH TO JUDGE ARIGHT AND TO EXAMINE EACHMATTER. To this revelation he assented the sooner, as heconfesses, because it was answerable to that of the Apostle to theThessalonians, PROVE ALL THINGS, HOLD FAST THAT WHICH IS GOOD. And he might have added another remarkable saying of the sameauthor: TO THE PURE, ALL THINGS ARE PURE; not only meats anddrinks, but all kind of knowledge whether of good or evil; theknowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the willand conscience be not defiled.

For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some ofevil substance; and yet God, in that unapocryphal vision, saidwithout exception, RISE, PETER, KILL AND EAT, leaving thechoice to each man's discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiatedstomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best booksto a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evil. Badmeats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiestconcoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they toa discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover,to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Whereof what betterwitness can ye expect I should produce, than one of your own nowsitting in Parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in thisland, Mr. Selden; whose volume of natural and national laws proves,not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisitereasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that allopinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of mainservice and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what istruest. I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge theuniversal diet of man's body, saving ever the rules of temperance,he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repastingof our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercisehis own leading capacity.

How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through thewhole life of man! Yet God commits the managing so great a trust,without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour ofevery grown man. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jewsfrom heaven, that omer, which was every man's daily portion ofmanna, is computed to have been more than might have well sufficedthe heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For those actions whichenter into a man, rather than issue out of him, and thereforedefile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhoodof prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be hisown chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if lawand compulsion should grow so fast upon those things whichheretofore were governed only by exhortation. Solomon informs us,that much reading is a weariness to the flesh; but neither he norother inspired author tells us that such or such reading isunlawful: yet certainly had God thought good to limit us herein, ithad been much more expedient to have told us what was unlawful thanwhat was wearisome. As for the burning of those Ephesian books bySt. Paul's converts; 'tis replied the books were magic, the Syriacso renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leavesus to a voluntary imitation: the men in remorse burnt those bookswhich were their own; the magistrate by this example is notappointed; these men practised the books, another might perhapshave read them in some sort usefully.

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow uptogether almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is soinvolved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so manycunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confusedseeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cullout, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from outthe rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil,as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. Andperhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good andevil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore thestate of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, whatcontinence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that canapprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seemingpleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet preferthat which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised andunbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary butslinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be runfor, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocenceinto the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifiesus is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtuetherefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil,and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, andrejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is butan excremental whiteness. Which was the reason why our sage andserious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a betterteacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance underthe person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the caveof Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see andknow, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey ofvice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of humanvirtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, howcan we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions ofsin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearingall manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had ofbooks promiscuously read.

But of the harm that may result hence three kinds are usuallyreckoned. First, is feared the infection that may spread; but thenall human learning and controversy in religious points must removeout of the world, yea the Bible itself; for that ofttimes relatesblasphemy not nicely, it describes the carnal sense of wicked mennot unelegantly, it brings in holiest men passionately murmuringagainst Providence through all the arguments of Epicurus: in othergreat disputes it answers dubiously and darkly to the commonreader. And ask a Talmudist what ails the modesty of his marginalKeri, that Moses and all the prophets cannot persuade him topronounce the textual Chetiv. For these causes we all know theBible itself put by the Papist must be next removed, as Clement ofAlexandria, and that Eusebian book of Evangelic preparation,transmitting our ears through a hoard of heathenish obscenities toreceive the Gospel. Who finds not that Irenaeus, Epiphanius,Jerome, and others discover more heresies than they well confute,and that oft for heresy which is the truer opinion?

Nor boots it to say for these, and all the heathen writers ofgreatest infection, if it must be thought so, with whom is bound upthe life of human learning, that they writ in an unknown tongue, solong as we are sure those languages are known as well to the worstof men, who are both most able and most diligent to instil thepoison they suck, first into the courts of princes, acquaintingthem with the choicest delights and criticisms of sin. As perhapsdid that Petronius whom Nero called his Arbiter, the master of hisrevels; and the notorious ribald of Arezzo, dreaded and yet dear tothe Italian courtiers. I name not him for posterity's sake, whomHenry VIII. named in merriment his vicar of hell. By whichcompendious way all the contagion that foreign books can infusewill find a passage to the people far easier and shorter than anIndian voyage, though it could be sailed either by the north ofCataio eastward, or of Canada westward, while our Spanish licensinggags the English press never so severely.

But on the other side that infection which is from books ofcontroversy in religion is more doubtful and dangerous to thelearned than to the ignorant; and yet those books must be permitteduntouched by the licenser. It will be hard to instance where anyignorant man hath been ever seduced by papistical book in English,unless it were commended and expounded to him by some of thatclergy: and indeed all such tractates, whether false or true, areas the prophecy of Isaiah was to the eunuch, not to be UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT A GUIDE. But of our priests and doctors howmany have been corrupted by studying the comments of Jesuits andSorbonists, and how fast they could transfuse that corruption intothe people, our experience is both late and sad. It is not forgot,since the acute and distinct Arminius was perverted merely by theperusing of a nameless discourse written at Delft, which at firsthe took in hand to confute.

Seeing, therefore, that those books, and those in greatabundance, which are likeliest to taint both life and doctrine,cannot be suppressed without the fall of learning and of allability in disputation, and that these books of either sort aremost and soonest catching to the learned, from whom to the commonpeople whatever is heretical or dissolute may quickly be conveyed,and that evil manners are as perfectly learnt without books athousand other ways which cannot be stopped, and evil doctrine notwith books can propagate, except a teacher guide, which he mightalso do without writing, and so beyond prohibiting, I am not ableto unfold, how this cautelous enterprise of licensing can beexempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts. And hewho were pleasantly disposed could not well avoid to liken it tothe exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crowsby shutting his park gate.

Besides another inconvenience, if learned men be the firstreceivers out of books and dispreaders both of vice and error, howshall the licensers themselves be confided in, unless we can conferupon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in theland, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness? And again,if it be true that a wise man, like a good refiner, can gather goldout of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool withthe best book, yea or without book; there is no reason that weshould deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdom, while weseek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrained will beno hindrance to his folly. For if there should be so muchexactness always used to keep that from him which is unfit for hisreading, we should in the judgment of Aristotle not only, but ofSolomon and of our Saviour, not vouchsafe him good precepts, and byconsequence not willingly admit him to good books; as being certainthat a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, than afool will do of sacred Scripture.

'Tis next alleged we must not expose ourselves to temptationswithout necessity, and next to that, not employ our time in vainthings. To both these objections one answer will serve, out of thegrounds already laid, that to all men such books are nottemptations, nor vanities, but useful drugs and materials wherewithto temper and compose effective and strong medicines, which man'slife cannot want. The rest, as children and childish men, who havenot the art to qualify and prepare these working minerals, well maybe exhorted to forbear, but hindered forcibly they cannot be by allthe licensing that Sainted Inquisition could ever yet contrive. Which is what I promised to deliver next: that this order oflicensing conduces nothing to the end for which it was framed; andhath almost prevented me by being clear already while thus muchhath been explaining. See the ingenuity of Truth, who, when shegets a free and willing hand, opens herself faster than the pace ofmethod and discourse can overtake her.

It was the task which I began with, to show that no nation, orwell-instituted state, if they valued books at all, did ever usethis way of licensing; and it might be answered, that this is apiece of prudence lately discovered. To which I return, that as itwas a thing slight and obvious to think on, so if it had beendifficult to find out, there wanted not among them long since whosuggested such a course; which they not following, leave us apattern of their judgment that it was not the rest knowing, but thenot approving, which was the cause of their not using it.

Plato, a man of high authority, indeed, but least of all for hisCommonwealth, in the book of his Laws, which no city ever yetreceived, fed his fancy by making many edicts to his airyburgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him wish had beenrather buried and excused in the genial cups of an Academic nightsitting. By which laws he seems to tolerate no kind of learningbut by unalterable decree, consisting most of practical traditions,to the attainment whereof a library of smaller bulk than his ownDialogues would be abundant. And there also enacts, that no poetshould so much as read to any private man what he had written,until the judges and law-keepers had seen it, and allowed it. Butthat Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth which hehad imagined, and to no other, is evident. Why was he not else alawgiver to himself, but a transgressor, and to be expelled by hisown magistrates; both for the wanton epigrams and dialogues whichhe made, and his perpetual reading of Sophron Mimus andAristophanes, books of grossest infamy, and also for commending thelatter of them, though he were the malicious libeller of his chieffriends, to be read by the tyrant Dionysius, who had little need ofsuch trash to spend his time on? But that he knew this licensingof poems had reference and dependence to many other provisos thereset down in his fancied republic, which in this world could have noplace: and so neither he himself, nor any magistrate or city, everimitated that course, which, taken apart from those othercollateral injunctions, must needs be vain and fruitless. For ifthey fell upon one kind of strictness, unless their care were equalto regulate all other things of like aptness to corrupt the mind,that single endeavour they knew would be but a fond labour; to shutand fortify one gate against corruption, and be necessitated toleave others round about wide open.

If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, wemust regulate all recreation and pastimes, all that is delightfulto man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but whatis grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that nogesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what bytheir allowance shall be thought honest; for such Plato wasprovided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers toexamine all the lutes, the violins, and the guitars in every house;they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must belicensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs andmadrigals that whisper softness in chambers? The windows also, andthe balconies must be thought on; there are shrewd books, withdangerous frontispieces, set to sale; who shall prohibit them,shall twenty licensers? The villages also must have their visitorsto inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck reads, even tothe ballatry and the gamut of every municipal fiddler, for theseare the countryman's Arcadias, and his Monte Mayors.

Next, what more national corruption, for which England hears illabroad, than household gluttony: who shall be the rectors of ourdaily rioting? And what shall be done to inhibit the multitudesthat frequent those houses where drunkenness is sold and harboured? Our garments also should be referred to the licensing of some moresober workmasters to see them cut into a less wanton garb. Whoshall regulate all the mixed conversation of our youth, male andfemale together, as is the fashion of this country? Who shallstill appoint what shall be discoursed, what presumed, and nofurther? Lastly, who shall forbid and separate all idle resort,all evil company? These things will be, and must be; but how theyshall be least hurtful, how least enticing, herein consists thegrave and governing wisdom of a state.

To sequester out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities,which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition; butto ordain wisely as in this world of evil, in the midst whereof Godhath placed us unavoidably. Nor is it Plato's licensing of bookswill do this, which necessarily pulls along with it so many otherkinds of licensing, as will make us all both ridiculous and weary,and yet frustrate; but those unwritten, or at least unconstraining,laws of virtuous education, religious and civil nurture, whichPlato there mentions as the bonds and ligaments of thecommonwealth, the pillars and the sustainers of every writtenstatute; these they be which will bear chief sway in such mattersas these, when all licensing will be easily eluded. Impunity andremissness, for certain, are the bane of a commonwealth; but herethe great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraintand punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

If every action, which is good or evil in man at ripe years, wereto be under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what werevirtue but a name, what praise could be then due to well-doing,what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent? Many there be thatcomplain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress;foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom tochoose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mereartificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions. Weourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or gift, which isof force: God therefore left him free, set before him a provokingobject, ever almost in his eyes; herein consisted his merit, hereinthe right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence. Whereforedid he create passions within us, pleasures round about us, butthat these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?

They are not skilful considerers of human things, who imagine toremove sin by removing the matter of sin; for, besides that it isa huge heap increasing under the very act of diminishing, thoughsome part of it may for a time be withdrawn from some persons, itcannot from all, in such a universal thing as books are; and whenthis is done, yet the sin remains entire. Though ye take from acovetous man all his treasure, he has yet one jewel left, ye cannotbereave him of his covetousness. Banish all objects of lust, shutup all youth into the severest discipline that can be exercised inany hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste, that came not hither so;such great care and wisdom is required to the right managing ofthis point. Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look howmuch we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for thematter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove themboth alike.

This justifies the high providence of God, who, though he commandus temperance, justice, continence, yet pours out before us, evento a profuseness, all desirable things, and gives us minds that canwander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect arigour contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging orscanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to thetrial of virtue and the exercise of truth? It would be betterdone, to learn that the law must needs be frivolous, which goes torestrain things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good and toevil. And were I the chooser, a dream of well-doing should bepreferred before many times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God sure esteems the growth and completing of onevirtuous person more than the restraint of ten vicious.

And albeit whatever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking,travelling, or conversing, may be fitly called our book, and is ofthe same effect that writings are, yet grant the thing to beprohibited were only books, it appears that this Order hitherto isfar insufficient to the end which it intends. Do we not see, notonce or oftener, but weekly, that continued court-libel against theParliament and City, printed, as the wet sheets can witness, anddispersed among us, for all that licensing can do? Yet this is theprime service a man would think, wherein this Order should giveproof of itself. If it were executed, you'll say. But certain, ifexecution be remiss or blindfold now, and in this particular, whatwill it be hereafter and in other books? If then the Order shallnot be vain and frustrate, behold a new labour, Lords and Commons,ye must repeal and proscribe all scandalous and unlicensed booksalready printed and divulged; after ye have drawn them up into alist, that all may know which are condemned, and which not; andordain that no foreign books be delivered out of custody, till theyhave been read over. This office will require the whole time ofnot a few overseers, and those no vulgar men. There be also bookswhich are partly useful and excellent, partly culpable andpernicious; this work will ask as many more officials, to makeexpurgations and expunctions, that the commonwealth of learning benot damnified. In fine, when the multitude of books increase upontheir hands, ye must be fain to catalogue all those printers whoare found frequently offending, and forbid the importation of theirwhole suspected typography. In a word, that this your Order may beexact and not deficient, ye must reform it perfectly according tothe model of Trent and Seville, which I know ye abhor to do.

Yet though ye should condescend to this, which God forbid, theOrder still would be but fruitless and defective to that endwhereto ye meant it. If to prevent sects and schisms, who is sounread or so uncatechized in story, that hath not heard of manysects refusing books as a hindrance, and preserving their doctrineunmixed for many ages, only by unwritten traditions? The Christianfaith, for that was once a schism, is not unknown to have spreadall over Asia, ere any Gospel or Epistle was seen in writing. Ifthe amendment of manners be aimed at, look into Italy and Spain,whether those places be one scruple the better, the honester, thewiser, the chaster, since all the inquisitional rigour that hathbeen executed upon books.

Another reason, whereby to make it plain that this Order willmiss the end it seeks, consider by the quality which ought to be inevery licenser. It cannot be denied but that he who is made judgeto sit upon the birth or death of books, whether they may be waftedinto this world or not, had need to be a man above the commonmeasure, both studious, learned, and judicious; there may be elseno mean mistakes in the censure of what is passable or not; whichis also no mean injury. If he be of such worth as behooves him,there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, agreater loss of time levied upon his head, than to be made theperpetual reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, ofttimes hugevolumes. There is no book that is acceptable unless at certainseasons; but to be enjoined the reading of that at all times, andin a hand scarce legible, whereof three pages would not down at anytime in the fairest print, is an imposition which I cannot believehow he that values time and his own studies, or is but of asensible nostril, should be able to endure. In this one thing Icrave leave of the present licensers to be pardoned for sothinking; who doubtless took this office up, looking on it throughtheir obedience to the Parliament, whose command perhaps made allthings seem easy and unlaborious to them; but that this short trialhath wearied them out already, their own expressions and excuses tothem who make so many journeys to solicit their licence aretestimony enough. Seeing therefore those who now possess theemployment by all evident signs wish themselves well rid of it; andthat no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his ownhours, is ever likely to succeed them, except he mean to puthimself to the salary of a press corrector; we may easily foreseewhat kind of licensers we are to expect hereafter, either ignorant,imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary. This is what I had toshow, wherein this Order cannot conduce to that end whereof itbears the intention.

I lastly proceed from the no good it can do, to the manifest hurtit causes, in being first the greatest discouragement and affrontthat can be offered to learning, and to learned men.

It was the complaint and lamentation of prelates, upon everyleast breath of a motion to remove pluralities, and distribute moreequally Church revenues, that then all learning would be for everdashed and discouraged. But as for that opinion, I never foundcause to think that the tenth part of learning stood or fell withthe clergy: nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthyspeech of any churchman who had a competency left him. Iftherefore ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discontent, not themercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free andingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study, and lovelearning for itself, not for lucre or any other end but the serviceof God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuityof praise which God and good men have consented shall be the rewardof those whose published labours advance the good of mankind; thenknow that, so far to distrust the judgment and the honesty of onewho hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended,as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor andexaminer, lest he should drop a schism, or something of corruption,is the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowingspirit that can be put upon him.

What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy atschool, if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescueof an Imprimatur; if serious and elaborate writings, as if theywere no more than the theme of a grammar-lad under his pedagogue,must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing andextemporizing licenser? He who is not trusted with his ownactions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to thehazard of law and penalty, has no great argument to think himselfreputed in the Commonwealth wherein he was born for other than afool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons upall his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches,meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with hisjudicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to beinformed in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him. If, in this the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness,no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities can bringhim to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted andsuspected, unless he carry all his considerate diligence, all hismidnight watchings and expense of Palladian oil, to the hasty viewof an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps hisinferior in judgment, perhaps one who never knew the labour ofbookwriting, and if he be not repulsed or slighted, must appear inprint like a puny with his guardian, and his censor's hand on theback of his title to be his bail and surety that he is no idiot orseducer, it cannot be but a dishonour and derogation to the author,to the book, to the privilege and dignity of learning.

And what if the author shall be one so copious of fancy, as tohave many things well worth the adding come into his mind afterlicensing, while the book is yet under the press, which not seldomhappens to the best and diligentest writers; and that perhaps adozen times in one book? The printer dares not go beyond hislicensed copy; so often then must the author trudge to his leave-giver, that those his new insertions may be viewed; and many ajaunt will be made, ere that licenser, for it must be the same man,can either be found, or found at leisure; meanwhile either thepress must stand still, which is no small damage, or the authorlose his accuratest thoughts, and send the book forth worse than hehad made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholyand vexation that can befall.

And how can a man teach with authority, which is the life ofteaching; how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to be, orelse had better be silent, whenas all he teaches, all he delivers,is but under the tuition, under the correction of his patriarchallicenser to blot or alter what precisely accords not with thehidebound humour which he calls his judgment? When every acutereader, upon the first sight of a pedantic licence, will be readywith these like words to ding the book a quoit's distance from him:I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to meunder the wardship of an overseeing fist. I know nothing of thelicenser, but that I have his own hand here for his arrogance; whoshall warrant me his judgment? The State, sir, replies thestationer, but has a quick return: The State shall be my governors,but not my critics; they may be mistaken in the choice of alicenser, as easily as this licenser may be mistaken in an author;this is some common stuff; and he might add from Sir Francis Bacon,THAT SUCH AUTHORIZED BOOKS ARE BUT THE LANGUAGE OF THE TIMES.For though a licenser should happen to be judicious more thanordinary, which will be a great jeopardy of the next succession,yet his very office and his commission enjoins him to let passnothing but what is vulgarly received already.

Nay, which is more lamentable, if the work of any deceasedauthor, though never so famous in his lifetime and even to thisday, come to their hands for licence to be printed, or reprinted,if there be found in his book one sentence of a venturous edge,uttered in the height of zeal (and who knows whether it might notbe the dictate of a divine spirit?) yet not suiting with every lowdecrepit humour of their own, though it were Knox himself, thereformer of a kingdom, that spake it, they will not pardon himtheir dash: the sense of that great man shall to all posterity belost, for the fearfulness or the presumptuous rashness of aperfunctory licenser. And to what an author this violence hathbeen lately done, and in what book of greatest consequence to befaithfully published, I could now instance, but shall forbear tilla more convenient season.

Yet if these things be not resented seriously and timely by themwho have the remedy in their power, but that such iron-moulds asthese shall have authority to gnaw out the choicest periods ofexquisitest books, and to commit such a treacherous fraud againstthe orphan remainders of worthiest men after death, the more sorrowwill belong to that hapless race of men, whose misfortune it is tohave understanding. Henceforth let no man care to learn, or careto be more than worldly-wise; for certainly in higher matters to beignorant and slothful, to be a common steadfast dunce, will be theonly pleasant life, and only in request.

And it is a particular disesteem of every knowing person alive,and most injurious to the written labours and monuments of thedead, so to me it seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the wholenation. I cannot set so light by all the invention, the art, thewit, the grave and solid judgment which is in England, as that itcan be comprehended in any twenty capacities how good soever, muchless that it should not pass except their superintendence be overit, except it be sifted and strained with their strainers, that itshould be uncurrent without their manual stamp. Truth andunderstanding are not such wares as to be monopolized and traded inby tickets and statutes and standards. We must not think to makea staple commodity of all the knowledge in the land, to mark andlicence it like our broadcloth and our woolpacks. What is it buta servitude like that imposed by the Philistines, not to be allowedthe sharpening of our own axes and coulters, but we must repairfrom all quarters to twenty licensing forges? Had anyone writtenand divulged erroneous things and scandalous to honest life,misusing and forfeiting the esteem had of his reason among men, ifafter conviction this only censure were adjudged him that he shouldnever henceforth write but what were first examined by an appointedofficer, whose hand should be annexed to pass his credit for himthat now he might be safely read; it could not be apprehended lessthan a disgraceful punishment. Whence to include the whole nation,and those that never yet thus offended, under such a diffident andsuspectful prohibition, may plainly be understood what adisparagement it is. So much the more, whenas debtors anddelinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but unoffensive booksmust not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title.

Nor is it to the common people less than a reproach; for if we beso jealous over them, as that we dare not trust them with anEnglish pamphlet, what do we but censure them for a giddy, vicious,and ungrounded people; in such a sick and weak state of faith anddiscretion, as to be able to take nothing down but through the pipeof a licenser? That this is care or love of them, we cannotpretend, whenas, in those popish places where the laity are mosthated and despised, the same strictness is used over them. Wisdomwe cannot call it, because it stops but one breach of licence, northat neither: whenas those corruptions, which it seeks to prevent,break in faster at other doors which cannot be shut.

And in conclusion it reflects to the disrepute of our ministersalso, of whose labours we should hope better, and of theproficiency which their flock reaps by them, than that after allthis light of the Gospel which is, and is to be, and all thiscontinual preaching, they should still be frequented with such anunprincipled, unedified and laic rabble, as that the whiff of everynew pamphlet should stagger them out of their catechism andChristian walking. This may have much reason to discourage theministers when such a low conceit is had of all their exhortations,and the benefiting of their hearers, as that they are not thoughtfit to be turned loose to three sheets of paper without a licenser;that all the sermons, all the lectures preached, printed, vented insuch numbers, and such volumes, as have now well nigh made allother books unsaleable, should not be armour enough against onesingle Enchiridion, without the castle of St. Angelo of anImprimatur.

And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that thesearguments of learned men's discouragement at this your Order aremere flourishes, and not real, I could recount what I have seen andheard in other countries, where this kind of inquisitiontyrannizes; when I have sat among their learned men, for thathonour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place ofphilosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselvesdid nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learningamongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped theglory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written nowthese many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that Ifound and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to theInquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than theFranciscan and Dominican licensers thought. And though I knew thatEngland then was groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke,nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness, that othernations were so persuaded of her liberty. Yet was it beyond myhope that those worthies were then breathing in her air, who shouldbe her leaders to such a deliverance, as shall never be forgottenby any revolution of time that this world hath to finish. Whenthat was once begun, it was as little in my fear that what words ofcomplaint I heard among learned men of other parts uttered againstthe Inquisition, the same I should hear by as learned men at home,uttered in time of Parliament against an order of licensing; andthat so generally that, when I had disclosed myself a companion oftheir discontent, I might say, if without envy, that he whom anhonest quaestorship had endeared to the Sicilians was not more bythem importuned against Verres, than the favourable opinion whichI had among many who honour ye, and are known and respected by ye,loaded me with entreaties and persuasions, that I would not despairto lay together that which just reason should bring into my mind,toward the removal of an undeserved thraldom upon learning. Thatthis is not therefore the disburdening of a particular fancy, butthe common grievance of all those who had prepared their minds andstudies above the vulgar pitch to advance truth in others, and fromothers to entertain it, thus much may satisfy.

And in their name I shall for neither friend nor foe conceal whatthe general murmur is; that if it come to inquisitioning again andlicensing, and that we are so timorous of ourselves, and sosuspicious of all men, as to fear each book and the shaking ofevery leaf, before we know what the contents are; if some who butof late were little better than silenced from preaching shall comenow to silence us from reading, except what they please, it cannotbe guessed what is intended by some but a second tyranny overlearning: and will soon put it out of controversy, that bishops andpresbyters are the same to us, both name and thing. That thoseevils of prelaty, which before from five or six and twenty seeswere distributively charged upon the whole people, will now lightwholly upon learning, is not obscure to us: whenas now the pastorof a small unlearned parish on the sudden shall be exaltedarchbishop over a large diocese of books, and yet not remove, butkeep his other cure too, a mystical pluralist. He who but of latecried down the sole ordination of every novice Bachelor of Art, anddenied sole jurisdiction over the simplest parishioner, shall nowat home in his private chair assume both these over worthiest andexcellentest books and ablest authors that write them.

This is not, ye Covenants and Protestations that we have made!this is not to put down prelaty; this is but to chop an episcopacy;this is but to translate the Palace Metropolitan from one kind ofdominion into another; this is but an old canonical sleight ofcommuting our penance. To startle thus betimes at a mereunlicensed pamphlet will after a while be afraid of everyconventicle, and a while after will make a conventicle of everyChristian meeting. But I am certain that a State governed by therules of justice and fortitude, or a Church built and founded uponthe rock of faith and true knowledge, cannot be so pusillanimous. While things are yet not constituted in religion, that freedom ofwriting should be restrained by a discipline imitated from theprelates and learnt by them from the Inquisition, to shut us up allagain into the breast of a licenser, must needs give cause of doubtand discouragement to all learned and religious men.

Who cannot but discern the fineness of this politic drift, andwho are the contrivers; that while bishops were to be baited down,then all presses might be open; it was the people's birthright andprivilege in time of Parliament, it was the breaking forth oflight. But now, the bishops abrogated and voided out of theChurch, as if our Reformation sought no more but to make room forothers into their seats under another name, the episcopal artsbegin to bud again, the cruse of truth must run no more oil,liberty of printing must be enthralled again under a prelaticalcommission of twenty, the privilege of the people nullified, and,which is worse, the freedom of learning must groan again, and toher old fetters: all this the Parliament yet sitting. Althoughtheir own late arguments and defences against the prelates mightremember them, that this obstructing violence meets for the mostpart with an event utterly opposite to the end which it drives at:instead of suppressing sects and schisms, it raises them andinvests them with a reputation. The punishing of wits enhancestheir authority, saith the Viscount St. Albans; and a forbiddenwriting is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up inthe faces of them who seek to tread it out. This Order,therefore, may prove a nursing-mother to sects, but I shall easilyshow how it will be a step-dame to Truth: and first by disenablingus to the maintenance of what is known already.

Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledgethrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth iscompared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flownot in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool ofconformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; andif he believe things only because his pastor says so, or theAssembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though hisbelief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.

There is not any burden that some would gladlier post off toanother than the charge and care of their religion. There be--whoknows not that there be?--of Protestants and professors who liveand die in as arrant an implicit faith as any lay Papist ofLoretto. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to hisprofits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of somany piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill tokeep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do? fain hewould have the name to be religious, fain he would bear up with hisneighbours in that. What does he therefore, but resolves to giveover toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose careand credit he may commit the whole managing of his religiousaffairs; some divine of note and estimation that must be. To himhe adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with allthe locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the veryperson of that man his religion; esteems his associating with hima sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So thata man may say his religion is now no more within himself, but isbecome a dividual movable, and goes and comes near him, accordingas that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives himgifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night,prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep; rises,is saluted, and after the malmsey, or some well-spiced brewage, andbetter breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladlyfed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walksabroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shoptrading all day without his religion.

Another sort there be who, when they hear that all things shallbe ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written butwhat passes through the custom-house of certain publicans that havethe tonnaging and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, willstraight give themselves up into your hands, make 'em and cut 'emout what religion ye please: there be delights, there berecreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about fromsun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with that which others havetaken so strictly and so unalterably into their own purveying? These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of ourknowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly and how tobe wished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fineconformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch andsolid piece of framework, as any January could freeze together.

Nor much better will be the consequence even among the clergythemselves. It is no new thing never heard of before, for aparochial minister, who has his reward and is at his Hercules'pillars in a warm benefice, to be easily inclinable, if he havenothing else that may rouse up his studies, to finish his circuitin an English Concordance and a topic folio, the gatherings andsavings of a sober graduateship, a Harmony and a Catena; treadingthe constant round of certain common doctrinal heads, attended withtheir uses, motives, marks, and means, out of which, as out of analphabet, or sol-fa, by forming and transforming, joining anddisjoining variously, a little bookcraft, and two hours'meditation, might furnish him unspeakably to the performance ofmore than a weekly charge of sermoning: not to reckon up theinfinite helps of interlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and otherloitering gear. But as for the multitude of sermons ready printedand piled up, on every text that is not difficult, our Londontrading St. Thomas in his vestry, and add to boot St. Martin andSt. Hugh, have not within their hallowed limits more vendible wareof all sorts ready made: so that penury he never need fear ofpulpit provision, having where so plenteously to refresh hismagazine. But if his rear and flanks be not impaled, if his backdoor be not secured by the rigid licenser, but that a bold book maynow and then issue forth and give the assault to some of his oldcollections in their trenches, it will concern him then to keepwaking, to stand in watch, to set good guards and sentinels abouthis received opinions, to walk the round and counter-round with hisfellow inspectors, fearing lest any of his flock be seduced, whoalso then would be better instructed, better exercised anddisciplined. And God send that the fear of this diligence, whichmust then be used, do not make us affect the laziness of alicensing Church.

For if we be sure we are in the right, and do not hold the truthguiltily, which becomes not, if we ourselves condemn not our ownweak and frivolous teaching, and the people for an untaught andirreligious gadding rout, what can be more fair than when a manjudicious, learned, and of a conscience, for aught we know, as goodas theirs that taught us what we know, shall not privily from houseto house, which is more dangerous, but openly by writing publish tothe world what his opinion is, what his reasons, and wherefore thatwhich is now thought cannot be sound? Christ urged it as wherewithto justify himself, that he preached in public; yet writing is morepublic than preaching; and more easy to refutation, if need be,there being so many whose business and profession merely it is tobe the champions of truth; which if they neglect, what can beimputed but their sloth, or unability?

Thus much we are hindered and disinured by this course oflicensing, toward the true knowledge of what we seem to know. Forhow much it hurts and hinders the licensers themselves in thecalling of their ministry, more than any secular employment, ifthey will discharge that office as they ought, so that of necessitythey must neglect either the one duty or the other, I insist not,because it is a particular, but leave it to their own conscience,how they will decide it there.

There is yet behind of what I purposed to lay open, theincredible loss and detriment that this plot of licensing puts usto; more than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havensand ports and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of ourrichest merchandise, truth; nay, it was first established and putin practice by Antichristian malice and mystery on set purpose toextinguish, if it were possible, the light of Reformation, and tosettle falsehood; little differing from that policy wherewith theTurk upholds his Alcoran, by the prohibition of printing. 'Tis notdenied, but gladly confessed, we are to send our thanks and vows toHeaven louder than most of nations, for that great measure of truthwhich we enjoy, especially in those main points between us and thePope, with his appurtenances the prelates: but he who thinks we areto pitch our tent here, and have attained the utmost prospect ofreformation that the mortal glass wherein we contemplate can showus, till we come to beatific vision, that man by this very opiniondeclares that he is yet far short of truth.

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, andwas a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended,and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose awicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the EgyptianTyphon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris,took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousandpieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time eversince, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitatingthe careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris,went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they couldfind them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, norever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bringtogether every joint and member, and shall mould them into animmortal feature of loveliness and perfection. Suffer not theselicensing prohibitions to stand at every place of opportunity,forbidding and disturbing them that continue seeking, that continueto do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyred saint.

We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the sun itself,it smites us into darkness. Who can discern those planets that areoft combust, and those stars of brightest magnitude that rise andset with the sun, until the opposite motion of their orbs bringthem to such a place in the firmament, where they may be seenevening or morning? The light which we have gained was given us,not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things moreremote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest,the unmitring of a bishop, and the removing him from off thepresbyterian shoulders, that will make us a happy nation. No, ifother things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life botheconomical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we havelooked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hathbeaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. There be whoperpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such acalamity that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their ownpride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither willhear with meekness, nor can convince; yet all must be suppressedwhich is not found in their Syntagma. They are the troublers, theyare the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others tounite those dissevered pieces which are yet wanting to the body ofTruth. To be still searching what we know not by what we know,still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body ishomogeneal and proportional), this is the golden rule in theologyas well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in aChurch; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, andinwardly divided minds.

Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereofye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow anddull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute toinvent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach ofany point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Thereforethe studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been soancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity andablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school ofPythagoras and the Persian wisdom took beginning from the oldphilosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, JuliusAgricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the naturalwits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French. Nor isit for nothing that the grave and frugal Transylvanian sends outyearly from as far as the mountainous borders of Russia, and beyondthe Hercynian wilderness, not their youth, but their staid men, tolearn our language and our theologic arts.

Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love ofHeaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar mannerpropitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nationchosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should beproclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet ofReformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinateperverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirablespirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator,perhaps neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the name ofLuther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reformingall our neighbours had been completely ours. But now, as ourobdurate clergy have with violence demeaned the matter, we arebecome hitherto the latest and the backwardest scholars, of whomGod offered to have made us the teachers. Now once again by allconcurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy anddevout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, Godis decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, evento the reforming of Reformation itself: what does he then butreveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to hisEnglishmen? I say, as his manner is, first to us, though we marknot the method of his counsels, and are unworthy.

Behold now this vast city: a city of refuge, the mansion house ofliberty, encompassed and surrounded with his protection; the shopof war hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashionout the plates and instruments of armed justice in defence ofbeleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads there, sitting bytheir studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions andideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty,the approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying allthings, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. Whatcould a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone toseek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly andpregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowingpeople, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckonmore than five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks;had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will bemuch arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good menis but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors ofsect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst afterknowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should ratherpraise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. Alittle generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, andsome grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, andunite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we butforgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences andChristian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I doubt not,if some great and worthy stranger should come among us, wise todiscern the mould and temper of a people, and how to govern it,observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent alacrity of ourextended thoughts and reasonings in the pursuance of truth andfreedom, but that he would cry out as Pyrrhus did, admiring theRoman docility and courage: If such were my Epirots, I would notdespair the greatest design that could be attempted, to make aChurch or kingdom happy.

Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics andsectaries; as if, while the temple of the Lord was building, somecutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars, thereshould be a sort of irrational men who could not consider theremust be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and inthe timber, ere the house of God can be built. And when everystone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into acontinuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither canevery piece of the building be of one form; nay rather theperfection consists in this, that, out of many moderate varietiesand brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional,arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends the wholepile and structure.

Let us therefore be more considerate builders, more wise inspiritual architecture, when great reformation is expected. Fornow the time seems come, wherein Moses the great prophet may sit inheaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of hisfulfilled, when not only our seventy elders, but all the Lord'speople, are become prophets. No marvel then though some men, andsome good men too perhaps, but young in goodness, as Joshua thenwas, envy them. They fret, and out of their own weakness are inagony, lest these divisions and subdivisions will undo us. Theadversary again applauds, and waits the hour: when they havebranched themselves out, saith he, small enough into parties andpartitions, then will be our time. Fool! he sees not the firmroot, out of which we all grow, though into branches: nor willbeware until he see our small divided maniples cutting through atevery angle of his ill-united and unwieldy brigade. And that weare to hope better of all these supposed sects and schisms, andthat we shall not need that solicitude, honest perhaps, thoughover-timorous, of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh inthe end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I havethese reasons to persuade me.

First, when a city shall be as it were besieged and blockedabout, her navigable river infested, inroads and incursions round,defiance and battle oft rumoured to be marching up even to herwalls and suburb trenches, that then the people, or the greaterpart, more than at other times, wholly taken up with the study ofhighest and most important matters to be reformed, should bedisputing, reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to ararity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written of,argues first a singular goodwill, contentedness and confidence inyour prudent foresight and safe government, Lords and Commons; andfrom thence derives itself to a gallant bravery and well-groundedcontempt of their enemies, as if there were no small number of asgreat spirits among us, as his was, who when Rome was nigh besiegedby Hannibal, being in the city, bought that piece of ground at nocheap rate, whereon Hannibal himself encamped his own regiment.

Next, it is a lively and cheerful presage of our happy successand victory. For as in a body, when the blood is fresh, thespirits pure and vigorous, not only to vital but to rationalfaculties, and those in the acutest and the pertest operations ofwit and subtlety, it argues in what good plight and constitutionthe body is; so when the cheerfulness of the people is so sprightlyup, as that it has not only wherewith to guard well its own freedomand safety, but to spare, and to bestow upon the solidest andsublimest points of controversy and new invention, it betokens usnot degenerated, nor drooping to a fatal decay, but casting off theold and wrinkled skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and waxyoung again, entering the glorious ways of truth and prosperousvirtue, destined to become great and honourable in these latterages. Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nationrousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking herinvincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mightyyouth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam;purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itselfof heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous andflocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutterabout, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble wouldprognosticate a year of sects and schisms.

What would ye do then? should ye suppress all this flowery cropof knowledge and new light sprung up and yet springing daily inthis city? Should ye set an oligarchy of twenty engrossers overit, to bring a famine upon our minds again, when we shall knownothing but what is measured to us by their bushel? Believe it,Lords and Commons, they who counsel ye to such a suppressing do asgood as bid ye suppress yourselves; and I will soon show how. Ifit be desired to know the immediate cause of all this free writingand free speaking, there cannot be assigned a truer than your ownmild and free and humane government. It is the liberty, Lords andCommons, which your own valorous and happy counsels have purchasedus, liberty which is the nurse of all great wits; this is thatwhich hath rarefied and enlightened our spirits like the influenceof heaven; this is that which hath enfranchised, enlarged andlifted up our apprehensions, degrees above themselves.

Ye cannot make us now less capable, less knowing, less eagerlypursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that madeus so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. Wecan grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye foundus; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be,oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye havefreed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughtsmore erected to the search and expectation of greatest and exactestthings, is the issue of your own virtue propagated in us; ye cannotsuppress that, unless ye reinforce an abrogated and merciless law,that fathers may dispatch at will their own children. And whoshall then stick closest to ye, and excite others? not he who takesup arms for coat and conduct, and his four nobles of Danegelt. Although I dispraise not the defence of just immunities, yet lovemy peace better, if that were all. Give me the liberty to know, toutter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above allliberties.

What would be best advised, then, if it be found so hurtful andso unequal to suppress opinions for the newness or theunsuitableness to a customary acceptance, will not be my task tosay. I only shall repeat what I have learned from one of your ownhonourable number, a right noble and pious lord, who, had he notsacrificed his life and fortunes to the Church and Commonwealth, wehad not now missed and bewailed a worthy and undoubted patron ofthis argument. Ye know him, I am sure; yet I for honour's sake,and may it be eternal to him, shall name him, the Lord Brook. Hewriting of episcopacy, and by the way treating of sects andschisms, left ye his vote, or rather now the last words of hisdying charge, which I know will ever be of dear and honoured regardwith ye, so full of meekness and breathing charity, that next tohis last testament, who bequeathed love and peace to his disciples,I cannot call to mind where I have read or heard words more mildand peaceful. He there exhorts us to hear with patience andhumility those, however they be miscalled, that desire to livepurely, in such a use of God's ordinances, as the best guidance oftheir conscience gives them, and to tolerate them, though in somedisconformity to ourselves. The book itself will tell us more atlarge, being published to the world, and dedicated to theParliament by him who, both for his life and for his death,deserves that what advice he left be not laid by without perusal.

And now the time in special is, by privilege to write and speakwhat may help to the further discussing of matters in agitation. The temple of Janus with his two controversial faces might now notunsignificantly be set open. And though all the winds of doctrinewere let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, wedo injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt herstrength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth putto the worse, in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is thebest and surest suppressing. He who hears what praying there isfor light and clearer knowledge to be sent down among us, wouldthink of other matters to be constituted beyond the discipline ofGeneva, framed and fabricked already to our hands. Yet when thenew light which we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envy andoppose, if it come not first in at their casements. What acollusion is this, whenas we are exhorted by the wise man to usediligence, to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures early andlate, that another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but bystatute? When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in thedeep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in alltheir equipage: drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle ranged:scattered and defeated all objections in his way; calls out hisadversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun,if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument:for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep anarrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, thoughit be valour enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardicein the wars of Truth.

For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make hervictorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error usesagainst her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when shesleeps, for then she speaks not true, as the old Proteus did, whospake oracles only when he was caught and bound, but then rathershe turns herself into all shapes, except her own, and perhapstunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before Ahab,until she be adjured into her own likeness. Yet is it notimpossible that she may have more shapes than one. What else isall that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on thisside or on the other, without being unlike herself? What but avain shadow else is the abolition of those ordinances, thathand-writing nailed to the cross? What great purchase is thisChristian liberty which Paul so often boasts of? His doctrine is,that he who eats or eats not, regards a day or regards it not, maydo either to the Lord. How many other things might be tolerated inpeace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it notthe chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging oneanother?

I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left aslavish print upon our necks; the ghost of a linen decency yethaunts us. We stumble and are impatient at the least dividing ofone visible congregation from another, though it be not infundamentals; and through our forwardness to suppress, and ourbackwardness to recover any enthralled piece of truth out of thegripe of custom, we care not to keep truth separated from truth,which is the fiercest rent and disunion of all. We do not seethat, while we still affect by all means a rigid externalformality, we may as soon fall again into a gross conformingstupidity, a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay andstubble, forced and frozen together, which is more to the suddendegenerating of a Church than many subdichotomies of petty schisms.

Not that I can think well of every light separation, or that allin a Church is to be expected gold and silver and preciousstones: it is not possible for man to sever the wheat from thetares, the good fish from the other fry; that must be the Angels'ministry at the end of mortal things. Yet if all cannot be of onemind--as who looks they should be?--this doubtless is morewholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many betolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery,and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions andcivil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate, provided firstthat all charitable and compassionate means be used to win andregain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evilabsolutely either against faith or manners no law can possiblypermit, that intends not to unlaw itself: but those neighbouringdifferences, or rather indifferences, are what I speak of, whetherin some point of doctrine or of discipline, which, though they maybe many, yet need not interrupt THE UNITY OF SPIRIT, if wecould but find among us THE BOND OF PEACE.

In the meanwhile if any one would write, and bring his helpfulhand to the slow-moving Reformation which we labour under, if Truthhave spoken to him before others, or but seemed at least to speak,who hath so bejesuited us that we should trouble that man withasking license to do so worthy a deed? and not consider this, thatif it come to prohibiting, there is not aught more likely to beprohibited than truth itself; whose first appearance to our eyes,bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly andunplausible than many errors, even as the person is of many a greatman slight and contemptuous to see to. And what do they tell usvainly of new opinions, when this very opinion of theirs, that nonemust be heard but whom they like, is the worst and newest opinionof all others; and is the chief cause why sects and schisms do somuch abound, and true knowledge is kept at distance from us;besides yet a greater danger which is in it.

For when God shakes a kingdom with strong and healthfulcommotions to a general reforming, 'tis not untrue that manysectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing; but yetmore true it is, that God then raises to his own work men of rareabilities, and more than common industry, not only to look back andrevise what hath been taught heretofore, but to gain further and goon some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth. For suchis the order of God's enlightening his Church, to dispense and dealout by degrees his beam, so as our earthly eyes may best sustainit.

Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of whatplace these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he seesnot as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devoteourselves again to set places, and assemblies, and outward callingsof men; planting our faith one while in the old Convocation house,and another while in the Chapel at Westminster; when all the faithand religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficientwithout plain convincement, and the charity of patient instructionto supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanestChristian, who desires to walk in the Spirit, and not in the letterof human trust, for all the number of voices that can be theremade; no, though Harry VII himself there, with all his liege tombsabout him, should lend them voices from the dead, to swell theirnumber.

And if the men be erroneous who appear to be the leadingschismatics, what withholds us but our sloth, our self-will, anddistrust in the right cause, that we do not give them gentlemeetings and gentle dismissions, that we debate not and examine thematter thoroughly with liberal and frequent audience; if not fortheir sakes, yet for our own? seeing no man who hath tastedlearning, but will confess the many ways of profiting by those who,not contented with stale receipts, are able to manage and set forthnew positions to the world. And were they but as the dust andcinders of our feet, so long as in that notion they may yet serveto polish and brighten the armoury of Truth, even for that respectthey were not utterly to be cast away. But if they be of thosewhom God hath fitted for the special use of these times witheminent and ample gifts, and those perhaps neither among thepriests nor among the Pharisees, and we in the haste of aprecipitant zeal shall make no distinction, but resolve to stoptheir mouths, because we fear they come with new and dangerousopinions, as we commonly forejudge them ere we understand them; noless than woe to us, while, thinking thus to defend the Gospel, weare found the persecutors.

There have been not a few since the beginning of this Parliament,both of the presbytery and others, who by their unlicensed books,to the contempt of an Imprimatur, first broke that triple ice clungabout our hearts, and taught the people to see day: I hope thatnone of those were the persuaders to renew upon us this bondagewhich they themselves have wrought so much good by contemning. Butif neither the check that Moses gave to young Joshua, nor thecountermand which our Saviour gave to young John, who was so readyto prohibit those whom he thought unlicensed, be not enough toadmonish our elders how unacceptable to God their testy mood ofprohibiting is; if neither their own remembrance what evil hathabounded in the Church by this set of licensing, and what good theythemselves have begun by transgressing it, be not enough, but thatthey will persuade and execute the most Dominican part of theInquisition over us, and are already with one foot in the stirrupso active at suppressing, it would be no unequal distribution inthe first place to suppress the suppressors themselves: whom thechange of their condition hath puffed up, more than their lateexperience of harder times hath made wise.

And as for regulating the press, let no man think to have thehonour of advising ye better than yourselves have done in thatOrder published next before this, "that no book be printed, unlessthe printer's and the author's name, or at least the printer's, beregistered." Those which otherwise come forth, if they be foundmischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be thetimeliest and the most effectual remedy that man's prevention canuse. For this authentic Spanish policy of licensing books, if Ihave said aught, will prove the most unlicensed book itself withina short while; and was the immediate image of a Star Chamber decreeto that purpose made in those very times when that Court did therest of those her pious works, for which she is now fallen from thestars with Lucifer. Whereby ye may guess what kind of stateprudence, what love of the people, what care of religion or goodmanners there was at the contriving, although with singularhypocrisy it pretended to bind books to their good behaviour. Andhow it got the upper hand of your precedent Order so wellconstituted before, if we may believe those men whose professiongives them cause to inquire most, it may be doubted there was in itthe fraud of some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade ofbookselling; who under pretence of the poor in their Company not tobe defrauded, and the just retaining of each man his several copy,which God forbid should be gainsaid, brought divers glossingcolours to the House, which were indeed but colours, and serving tono end except it be to exercise a superiority over theirneighbours; men who do not therefore labour in an honest professionto which learning is indebted, that they should be made other men'svassals. Another end is thought was aimed at by some of them inprocuring by petition this Order, that, having power in theirhands, malignant books might the easier scape abroad, as the eventshows.

But of these sophisms and elenchs of merchandise I skill not. This I know, that errors in a good government and in a bad areequally almost incident; for what magistrate may not bemisinformed, and much the sooner, if liberty of printing be reducedinto the power of a few? But to redress willingly and speedilywhat hath been erred, and in highest authority to esteem a plainadvertisement more than others have done a sumptuous bride, is avirtue (honoured Lords and Commons) answerable to your highest actions,and whereof none can participate but greatest and wisest men.